The Melon Farmers were originally
conceived by Dave and Phil Martin in 1996. Phil
concentrated on TV censorship whilst Dave published information about film
and video censorship.

The name was inspired by Alex Cox who was asked to
prepare a BBC friendly dub of his Repo Man. With tongue firmly in cheek, he
overdubbed 'motherfucker' with 'melon farmer'. Censorship surely, but
somehow Alex Cox showed that censorship could be defeated via spirit and
humour. The Melon Farmers were born to serve this end.

The Melon Farmers are not a traditional campaigning or political
organisation. There are no members, subscriptions or constitutions. Just a
bunch of good people who contribute news, information and opinion. The
objectives and aims of the Melon Farmers are an aggregation of the many that
contribute, nothing more and nothing less. But somehow news, information and
opinion makes for a very effective campaign.

The remit of the Melon Farmers has extended somewhat from the early days.
The censorship of sex and violence in the media is still the primary focus
but the Melon Farmers now extend to political and economic censorship the
world over.

The Melon Farmers also take particular interest in those that claim to
occupy the moral high ground and who seek to deny sexual enjoyment from
their fellow man. Every person should be free to enjoy sex and life
restricted only by the requirement to be considerate of others.

The
website is still edited by Dave but the spirit of Melon Farming lies
with the thousands of contributors and readers who request and demand that
life and sex can be enjoyed to the full without unnecessary restriction.

Harry
Dean Stanton, the veteran American actor who ballasted
generations of independent and cult films, has died aged 91. The
subject of the late critic Roger Ebert's Stanton Walsh Rule --
No movie featuring either Harry Dean Stanton or M Emmet Walsh in
a supporting role can be altogether bad -- Stanton was famed for
his ability to project his hangdog, laconic charm into minor
roles, which ensured he worked continuously for over six
decades. Directors who cast him include David Lynch, Sam
Peckinpah, Ridley Scott, Alex Cox and Wim Wenders, but he was
never nominated for an Oscar or any of the other principal
acting awards.

Alex Cox's Repo Man was inspirational to this website, by
cining the term 'melonfarmer' as an overdub for 'motherfucker'
in a TV edit of the movie. The video clip shows Harry Dean
Stanton being 'flipped' over by his boss.

29th January 2015

Updated:

Proud to be
Blocked...

Who's blocking Melon Farmers?

Thanks to readers who have reported blocks

UAE

MelonFarmers.co.uk is blocked in the UAE although
CensorWatch.co.uk is allowed without censorship.

Update:
T Mobile vie ee

17th March 2015. @PornPanic tweeted:

Tried to access @melonfarmers just now & this came up.

Update: Virgin Media

14th June 2017. @gazminator tweeted

I can't access the site via Virgin Media but can when I'm in
McDonald's!!

19th
June 2014

The Original Melonfarmer...

By Daniel Stilling

If
you're reading this, you are almost certainly familiar with the
term melonfarmer and its significance. For those of you
who aren't, it was used by director Alex Cox to re-dub the
expletive motherfucker in the version of Repo Man
he prepared specially for television.

According to Alex Cox
himself, this version came about after being called in to fix a
very bizarre re-edit that the studio had put together itself.
Cox said:

In an effort to explain the film,
someone had gone and shot an insert of the license plate of
the Chevy Malibu, and made the Hopi symbol dissolve into the
HEAD OF THE DEVIL!. He continued, They'd intercut static
shots of this license plate with shots of the car moving,
and it looked completely cheesy, worse than an Ed Wood film.

The much loved variant Cox put together - actually seven
minutes longer than the theatrical version - was finally made
available for the first time since its original broadcast on
BBC2 as part of
Masters Of Cinema's excellent Blu-ray release in February
2012, but did you ever wonder how the term came about? How do
you get from motherfucker to the euphemistic substitution
melonfarmer? Was the term ever used before the TV version
of Repo Man?

After the TV version was first broadcast and the phrase came
into the popular consciousness, the first thought of some film
enthusiasts was that it was taken from or somehow inspired by
the 1974 Charles Bronson film Mr. Majestyk. In that
movie, Bronson plays a water melon farmer who is threatened by
labour racketeers and gangsters who want to either drive him out
of business or kill him. They scare off his labourers and
machine gun his melons until stoic diplomacy just won't cut it
any more and he falls back on the plan B Bronson usually
employed throughout the seventies...kill everybody. There are
lots of melons on show, but at no time in Elmore Leonard's
screenplay is the term used as a substitute for the expletive.
All melonfarmers in the picture actually farm melons.

It wasn't until many years later, listening to the
soundtrack for the film Performance that I noticed
something that may finally explain the origin of the phrase.
Donald Cammell and Nicolas Roeg's film was extremely
controversial on its release in 1970 for its sex, nudity,
sadomasochistic violence and drug use, but what is not often
noted is that the controversy also extended to one of the
selections on the soundtrack. The song in question was the
spoken word piece Wake Up, Niggers! by The Last Poets.
In the film the track cut short, but if you listen to the full
version featured on the soundtrack record - and also on The Last
Poets eponymous debut album - the song includes the line,
...up against the wall black melonfarmer....

The film and the album date to 1970 making this the earliest
use of the phrase suggesting that the term was invented by The
Last Poets as a way to allude to the expletive without actually
using it. This would make sense because around the same time,
the proto-punk band MC5 ran into trouble when their debut
album Kick Out The Jams opened with the shout of Kick
Out The Jams, Motherfucker! leading to some controversy and
later copies of the record being censored.

Thinking that I'd made a connection no one else had noticed,
I searched around online for a summary of the lyrics for Wake
Up, Niggers! to confirm it. All sources claim that the words
for that line are not as I initially thought ...up against
the wall black melonfarmer..., but are actually ...up
against the wall black male and farmer....

So could that be it? Did the famous term actually come into
being after Alex Cox misheard a line from The Last Poets' song,
and in doing so accidentally coined a phrase that has persisted
to this day as an amusing euphemism...and the inspiration for
this very website?

When Alex Cox was asked about the films copious bad language
and how he felt about having to remove it all for the TV
version, he said:

By then I'd made Sid & Nancy and
I was sick of swearing. It was fun coming up with synonyms
for the swear words - 'Melon Farmers' was a particular
favourite.

I don't think there is any doubt that Alex Cox invented the
phrase - since used by Samuel L. Jackson in the TV version of
Die Hard With A Vengeance - but has its ubiquitousness with
movie re-dubbing in the years since the TV version of Repo Man
led to a bit of self mythologising on Cox's part? To be honest
melonfarmer is the only really inventive substitution in
the TV version, far more so than the flip you and
variations on that that make up the majority of the other
substitutions. Was The Last Poets' track subconsciously at work
and pointing him in the right direction. I guess you'll have to
decide for yourself about that.

Yippie-ki-yay motherfucker!...

US TV versions of Die Hard feature the 'melon farmer'
overdub

In the movie
Die Hard, Euro-trash terrorist Hans
Gruber asks hero John McClane if he saw too many films as a child and
thinks he’s John Wayne.

Do you really think you have a chance against us, Mister Cowboy?Gruber asks.

McClane iconically retorts:
Yippie-ki-yay, motherfucker!.

But some US TV versions have McClane retorting:
Yippie-ki-yay, melon
farmer!.

The Young and Prodigious T.S. Spivet is a 2013 France / Canada family adventure
TV movie by Jean-Pierre Jeunet.
Starring Helena Bonham Carter, Robert Maillet and Judy Davis.

A 10-year-old cartographer secretly leaves his family's ranch in Montana where he lives with his cowboy father and scientist mother and travels across the country on board a freight train to receive an award at the Smithsonian Institute.

UK: Passed 12A for infrequent strong language after pre-cut for:

2014 [2D + 3D] cinema release

The BBFC commented:

This film was seen for advice, prior to formal submission. The company was informed that the likely classification was 15, but that their preferred 12A could be achieved by removing a single use of the word 'motherfucker'. When the film was submitted for
formal classification, this word had been replaced and the film was classified 12A.

Thanks to Pooch: You Melon Farmer!

Towards the end of the film, the titular character does
a TV interview, whilst being manipulated by the lady who runs the
Smithsonian Institute. In the original film, after the interview
spectacularly fails, she calls Spivet You motherfucker, albeit at a
distance, and from behind her, so you can't see her face/mouth!

In the UK version, motherfucker has been dubbed
quite well by the same actress, or at least someone who sounds very similar,
with the immortal You melon-farmer!

If it weren't for this, and two uses of the word fuck,
which were all completely unnecessary and totally jarring, this would have
been a PG-rated film, ideal for youngsters and families.

9th August 2005

Campaigner...

Campaigner
Erotic Awards 2005

Melon Farmers finalist at the Erotic Awards

The Melon Farmers are proud to have reached the finals for
the Erotic Awards. It is an honour to be part of the good work done in
promoting generosity and enjoyment of sex.

ORG
have set up an internet service to check which ISPs block
websites that the user is interested in. Here are the results
for
www.melonfarmers.co.uk.

The results presented below
may be different to your experience depending on the level of
filtering configured on your network.

ISP

Result

Last check on

Last blocked on

AAISP

ok

2015-02-01 00:31:14

No record of prior block

BT-Light

ok

2015-02-01 00:31:14

No record of prior block

BT-Moderate

ok

2014-07-03 16:32:59

No record of prior block

BT-Strict

ok

2014-06-03 01:17:02

No record of prior block

EE

blocked

2014-12-13 19:38:48

2014-12-13 19:38:48

O2

blocked

2015-02-01 20:01:34

2015-02-01 20:01:34

Plusnet

ok

2015-02-01 00:31:19

No record of prior block

Sky filter default

blocked

2015-02-01 00:31:14

2015-02-01 00:31:14

TalkTalk Kidsafe

ok

2015-02-01 00:31:14

No record of prior block

TalkTalk Strict

ok

2014-07-02 19:32:56

No record of prior block

Three

blocked

2014-12-06 17:55:56

2014-12-06 17:55:56

VirginMedia

blocked

2017-06-14

No record of prior block

Vodafone

blocked

2015-02-01 00:31:15

2015-02-01 00:31:15

ORG explains the level of blocking that the website tests
against:

We're testing using the default "adult
content" filter levels for each network. Where an ISP
provided their service with a level of filtering active by
default we chose not to change these settings. For lines
that came with no filtering active by default we activated
the "medium" filtering level where a choice of filters was
offered. If the choice was just filtering: yes or no, we
chose yes. Some networks do not offer controls to activate
filtering or change filter settings on their services. This
means the active level of filtering varies across our test
lines